Enjoy old or unusual movies? Here’s a review: “Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” (2010): Spend a year on the beautiful Siberian snow forest with fur trappers. Werner Herzog and co-director Dmitry Vasyukov embed in the river village Bakhtia, which is so remote that the only way to get there is either helicopter or riverboat (during the short summer season when the Yenisei River isn’t frozen). While some of the villagers are indigenous Ket, most are from Russia or the former Soviet republics.
You’ll watch the locals make skis, canoes and complex animal traps by hand, and see how their living earned off of the woodland sables has not changed much in a century. The hunters cannot be successful hunters without their dogs, which get a lot of screen time. Now streaming on Hoopla “Fireball: Visitors From Darker Worlds” (2020): Here is director Herzog’s meditation on all species of rocks that fall on us from the sky: meteors, comets and asteroids.
Starting in Mexico, at the center of the crater left by the titanic impact that spelled doom for the dinosaurs and opened the path for mammals, he takes us around the world: Siberia, France and even Antarctica. The southern continent may be the most fascinating on the journey for the simple fact that, on the high glacier plains, any rock you find is going to be a meteorite. There is also a fascinating exploration of a new scientific way to study cosmic dust in order to identify micrometeorites.
It’s a fascinating trip. Now.